It is good, finally, to hear some contrition from the Catholic Church. But it is clear from the appalling stories that now surface daily that child abuse was not the invention or the monopoly of the Church; and equally, the actual reality of child abuse is a new public discovery. In the past decade we have lost an innocence which protected us from a knowledge of what men can really be capable of, writes Kevin Myers.
Before that, we didn't know of such things, nor would we have accepted them as possible. If any of the girls or boys who had been buggered by priests or family members, including their fathers, in the 1960s, had come to this newspaper in the early 1980s to complain, I fear either that they would not have been believed, or that we would have been too respectful of the power of the Catholic Church to have carried the story.
Boarding schools
We probably used the term "unsubstantiated", "hysterical", "imagined" to describe such tales. Any of us who had been to Catholic boarding schools knew that there had always been clerical gropers of teenage boys; but the idea of little children being raped was too preposterous for words, in every sense. Our ignorance of what human nature - though when we say that, we are really talking about male nature - was capable of was, we now know, truly breathtaking. For we knew as much about the reality of pederasty as Victorian society knew about atomic power.
But how ignorant was the Catholic Church? It had ways of seeing into the conduct of individuals which were closed to the rest of us. It had the confessional. I can hardly believe that all these priests who were abusing children did not, at least sometimes, confess their deeds to other priests. And though priests are bound to an oath of confidentiality, did not some of them hear things which might have prompted them to express a generalised concern to higher quarters? And how often did the father-confessor play a vital part in the maintenance of the psychological balance of the abuser, who, having confessed to raping a child, and having expressed a firm purpose of amendment - that is, his resolute intention never to repeat the sin - was given the blessed unction of absolution? With a light heart, and having said his penance, he could leave the sin behind him. So that when he raped again, the sin was fresh and new; for the burden of other, earlier sins had been utterly cleansed from his conscience.
Patrick Hughes
Think about wicked men like the priest Patrick Hughes, who repeatedly raped and abused a young altar boy in Dublin 30 years ago. When the Dublin archdiocese was informed about the violation and buggery of this eight-year-old infant, it merely moved the priest to another parish. Later, it assisted him in the US. Hughes has never been charged with any offences, for which he has since paid his victim £50,000.
Now, throughout his time raping and abusing this boy in ways too terrible to describe here, did he confess what he was doing to another priest? And did that other priest patiently and regularly dispense absolution, enabling Hughes to saunter out of the church whistling with a clear conscience? And did that priest thus become a psychological helpmeet of Hughes? Did he thereby become an accessory to rape? And how much more is there to discover about Hughes, and Brendan Smith, and Ivan Payne? The guilt aroused by their defilement of how many victims was assuaged in the confessional?
It is not merely a matter of sex, but of power. That was what went to the Catholic Church's head, in the last decade of its glory, which is now gone for ever; power by any means. It played every card in its hand, as if they were all of equal religious merit. Thus, instead of quietly declaring that the moving statue of Ballinspittle was simply an optical illusion, it milked it for what it was worth. Instead of acknowledging that Knock did not need the longest runway in Ireland, it bullied government after government into paying for it. It even entered into an informal coalition with, all of all people, Charles Haughey. And it permitted odious creatures such as Father Michael Cleary to become the voice of reactionary, populist Catholicism.
Sniggering observations
Yet the Church was not alone in its sin: the rest of us did not tell the truth, because we lacked the courage. When, as a novice journalist, I interviewed Cleary, he repeatedly regaled me with sniggering observations on the lines of: "God it must be great to be a young fella these days - riding rings around you, I bet, Kevin, are you? After the birds, screwing every chance you can get, wha'?"
I allowed what I intended to be a bleak look settle upon my face at these endlessly grubby interpolations, before his housekeeper came with tea and biscuits. She silently put the tray down and turned to leave. As she did so, he nodded at her, smirked proudly, and gave me a long, low, lubricious wink. It was a moment of transfixing vulgarity and utter personal betrayal.
When I wrote up the interview, I said what a great and human character he was. It came as no surprise to me decades later to learn that he was the father of the housekeeper's child, as he had been a humbug, a poltroon and a liar all along. And what had I done to make these truths known? Nothing.